On December 10^th, Hannah brought over Viv Albertine for an afternoon drink. It was great to meet her. We had met before, a decade ago with Thurston Moore at the Stoke Newington Literary Festival where she was launching her autobiography Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, Boys. (as said by her mother when she was a teenager). It’s a wonderful book, mostly about her time with The Slits and adventures with all the usual suspects: Sid Vicious, Johnny Rotten, Mick Jones, and helpfully lists the page numbers for Sex, Drugs and Punk Rock for those in a hurry. 

I made a second visit to the Monet in London exhibition at the Courtauld, this time with my friend Martha Stevns who once ran a gallery herself. For Londoners at the turn of the twentieth century, the thick fog – smog it was called later – was a major health hazard but Monet loved it and made more than 100 paintings of the Thames shrouded in fog, made either from the balconies on the top two floors of the Savoy Hotel, from the other side of the river from St. Thomas’s hospital.  There are just three views: Waterloo Bridge, Charing Cross Bridge and the Houses of Parliament. He returned with them all unfinished and completed them at his studio in Giverny. This exhibition reunites most of the 37 paintings he called ‘Vues de la Tamise’  [‘Views of the Thames’], finished in 1905 and intended for an exhibition back in London. Monet liked to work in series: haystacks, waterlilies, Rouen cathedral, but his work was in such demand that they were sold before it could happen. This remarkable show has brought them back together, 120 later, and for the first (and possibly only) time we can see this incredible series as originally envisioned. 

There are few great paintings of London; unlike Paris where there are hundreds, it is not a city that lends itself to that kind of celebration. In fact Monet was not painting London, he was painting an atmospheric condition; one that he had painted many times before. It must have reminded him of the industrial port of Le Havre, where he grew up: Light and air seen through the steam and smoke of the docks that he drew and painted hundreds of times. Impressionism is a northern art, born from the rapidly changing light conditions, where the passage of a cloud can change everything. He worked in series, 30 or 40 canvases on a particular theme. He finished in the studio to represent a particular state of the light.  Cezanne was the only one who develop impressionism in the south with its steady luminosity.

So we can be grateful that a great master chose to paint here, even if it was not London itself that interested him. Martha pointed out that the pictures are better seen from some distance because only then does his technique gel and reveal his virtuosity. He applies his paint on in bold brushstrokes, taken from Delacroix. A scrim of colour brings the Thames alive: the choppy, restless water surface slopping around the bridge below the fog, reflects the weak sun, and suddenly it’s London. The rooms were all filled to capacity (and always booked-up for weeks ahead so it was hard to get a distant view, particularly during my first visit. Now it was worth waiting for a gap in the sightline to see each painting click into place, like focussing a camera.) They are wonderful. 

It was December, as usual filled with dinners and celebrations. There was Sara Stevns’ birthday, held at Moro in Exmouth Market. Photo of her speech below. Dinner with Fran Bentley, surrounded by her pictures. Dinner with Valerie who cured her own salmon and made her own game pie. Delicious it was. Mina took a photograph. Viv Albertine and Hannah Watson came to dinner, so did Jill and so did Martha. Fun times for all. 

Well that didn’t last long did it? When Henry Luce, in a February 1941 Life editorial called for ‘an American Century’, saying the US should ‘exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit,’ he clearly expected American leadership, however unwillingly received by the rest of the world, to last until the middle of the 21st century. But with Trump, it has already gone. No-one will ever take the United States seriously again. American moral superiority was always a deeply suspect idea to begin with, but it’s over, destroyed by a convicted criminal, a narcist surrounded by a court of weirdos, religious maniacs, conspiracy-theorists and cranks. Let’s hope we survive the nest four years.  The American Century lasted about 75 years; a blink of the eye compared to, say, Egypt’s 3,000 years before the Romans, or the Romans’ own roughly 1,000 years or even the 3-400 years of the British Empire. What, I wonder, will America be known for, if at all? My guess would be for the Moon landings and for Hiroshima and Nagasaki: the first – and I surely hope, the only – use of nuclear weapons against civilian targets. Also for jazz and rock ‘n’ roll. 

The inmates have taken over the asylum. Everyone who collaborates in any way with Trump or his administration faces future ostracism, particularly in the arts and music communities and probably within the better academic institutions as well. Good. There should never be any acceptance of his ideas as being in any way legitimate. My hope is that this time it will cause a groundswell of rebellion and dissent, similar to that of the Sixties youth movement against the Vietnam war. In fact, as well as popular opposition, I fully expect a new generation of Weathermen to emerge. Perhaps the next gunman won’t miss.

Meanwhile, Israel continues its programme of genocide, but world opinion is gradually changing against them: 157 to 8 countries supported a UN General Assembly call for Israel to withdraw from all the occupied Palestinian territories based on pre-1967 borders. And for the first time there has been talk about reparations. From the river to the sea, it’s all Palestine.